The Long Exile

by Melanie McGrath

  In mid-April 1953, only six months after his posting begins, Ross Gibson picks up a telegram from Superintendent Henry Larsen, head of “G” or Arctic Division at the RCMP HQ in Ottawa. It reads as follows:

  It is suggested by Director Northern Administration to move this summer on the C. D. Howe from Port Harrison detachment 4 Eskimo families to Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island and 3 families to Cape Herschel on Ellesmere Island to hunt and trap for a living under the supervision of RCM Police detachments. Please ascertain whether any families are willing to go and if so their names and identification numbers and numbers of dependants and relationships of families involved … Conditions on Ellesmere should be carefully explained particularly the complete dark period …and other short days and only annual visits by supply ship … Families will be brought home at end of one year if they so desire.

  Gibson hands the telegram to Webster, who gives it a cursory read, flips it over in his hand and offers it back. This one's for you.

  A feeling of dread wells up in Ross Gibson. He understands something of what this request entails. What he does not yet know is that this telegram will colour the remainder of his life.

  In 1953, the Department of Northern Affairs in Ottawa, the “Northern Administration” of Larsen's telegram, was an extraordinary place to work. Still relatively new, a creation of Canada's postwar awakening to its great northern lands, the Department was staffed almost entirely by ex-Hudson Bay Company men, most of whom had done their time in the Arctic and knew each other from past postings there. These doughty men were young boys when Roald Amundsen sailed his way through the Northwest Passage and Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole. Their heroes were men of the golden age of Arctic exploration, men like Peary and Amundsen, Otto H. Sverdrup and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. They grew up with Nanook, and later, when they were working for the Hudson Bay Company in its Arctic postings, they saw Nanook and Nyla reflected in the faces of the Inuit they met. They fell in love with the Arctic but it became their Arctic, a whole world to the north of the tree line about which their friends and colleagues in the south knew almost nothing. They remained a tiny, self-regarding confederation of amateur experts, working now within the conventions of the federal bureaucracy but always, somehow, considering themselves a tribe apart.

  Of this band of fellow travellers, there was none so confident in his own mystique as James Cantley, the man who, in the 1930s, had set up the Baffin Trading Company post in Inukjuak to rival the Hudson Bay Company post there. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Cantley had done what many bright, impoverished Scotsmen had done before him and immigrated to Canada as a teenager to work for the Hudson Bay Company. He had made it as far as Assistant Fur Trade Commissioner at the Bay before leaving to go it alone. When his Baffin Trading Company went bust, which it quickly did, Cantley slunk back to Ottawa and found himself a cosy niche in the newly created Department of Northern Affairs. His failure as an independent fur trader proving no bar to success in the Arctic Division of the Department, Cantley soon found himself promoted to head of the Department's Arctic Services Section. Moving the Inuit out of Inukjuak was originally Cantley's idea and it was he who had done most of the paperwork on the move.

  The telegram in Ross Gibson's hands is from Henry Larsen, head of the “G” Division of the RCMP. Younger than Cantley by three years, Henry Asbjorn Larsen is already sitting at the top of a glittering northern career. Admiring voices speak of him in the same breath as Roald Amundsen, and there are undeniable similiarities. Larsen and Amundsen were both born in the same Norwegian fiord country and, like Amundsen, Larsen spent much of his childhood around boats. In 1928, when Josephie Flaherty and Ross Gibson were both boys, Henry Larsen immigrated to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and was immediately assigned to the St Roch, based out of Pauline Cove on Herschel Island, as ship's first mate. The St Roch was a revolutionary ship. Made from Douglas fir sheathed in Australian ironbark, she had been built with special pressure beams and a rounded hull which would allow her to bob upwards under ice pressure. Her job was to police the Arctic seas and monitor game regulations while moving personnel between police posts. Sailing in her was a test of any man's sea legs, the rounded hull listed terribly in the swell, but Larsen's salty good humour, his physical courage, his navigational skills, even his penchant for singing rousing hymns up on deck when all other hands were trembling below and praying for their lives, singled him out. After he was promoted to captain he naturalised and became a Canadian citizen. In a few years he had become known throughout the Arctic as Hanorie Umiarjuaq, Henry with the Big Ship.

  While Larsen was skippering the St Roch around the Arctic, the RCMP was trying to extend its reach in the far northern Canadian mainland and on the eastern Arctic islands. In luly 1922, the Arctic, led by Captain loseph-Elzar Bernier and expedition commander J. D. Craig, left Quebec City to set up an RCMP post close to Smith Sound to deter Inughuit Inuit living in northwestern Greenland from crossing the ice bridge across Smith Sound between Greenland and Ellesmere Island and hunting musk ox there. The ship was beaten back by heavy ice to a rocky inlet on Ellesmere's southern coast and Bernier and Craig decided to set up a detachment wherever they could land, which happened to be on a small promontory somewhat to the east of Grise Fiord, known henceforth as Craig Harbour, the place to where Henry Larsen was now planning to send Inuit families from Inukjuak. At Craig Harbour, the Mounties unloaded a prefabricated detachment hut, along with the head of the detachment, Inspector Wilcox, a regular detachment constable, Special Constable Kakto, and his wife, Ooarloo, who would act as housekeeper. Kakto and Ooarloo's two children would live with them. The Craig Harbour post soon foundered, however, jinxed, perhaps, by the knowledge of its own, accidental, birth. Only months after landing, Kakto and Ooarloo's children died of flu and their parents began demanding to go back to their home in Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. That same winter, the burlap in the inner lining of the ceiling of the detachment building caught fire, the extinguishers were frozen solid and the men had to watch while the flames ate their home. The inspector could find no willing replacement for Kakto on Baffin Island and Wilcox wrote to his superiors in Ottawa that “the climate is far more severe than Baffin Island, colder and darker in winter, making hunting conditions far different from Pond Inlet,” and that it was impossible to persuade Canadian Inuit to live there. Ottawa appeared undeterred by the news. In future, RCMP headquarters decreed, the detachment would have to recruit its Inuit special constables from among the Inughuit, or polar Inuit of northwestern Greenland, who could better tolerate the conditions. Canada needed flag bearers in her northernmost reaches and, one way or another, she would have them. The detachment at Craig Harbour would remain open.

  It was no secret that life at Craig Harbour was as tough as walrus leather for any white man who had the misfortune to be posted there and tougher still for the special constables. The detachment quickly became a kind of black joke in the force, the empty threat of irritated superiors or resentful subordinates. In summer, the Moun-ties were expected to go out after walrus and seal in order to build up a winter cache of meat for the sled dogs. As summer gave out to the short autumn, they would have to ready the detachment building for the oncoming winter, which meant making good the insulation banking, shovelling gravel into the holes in the tuff which had opened up around the detachment building during the summer months and giving the whole place a new coat of creosote and paint. When the dark period arrived in October, the Mounties would be expected to type their reports and hunker down against the weather. After the first light of the New Year arrived in February, they would set about repairing the sleds and dog harnesses and equipment then take off on the sleds to Flagler and Hayes fiords to hunt seal there. In March they would make dried pemmican for dog food to see them through the patrolling period. During the best of the High Arctic weather, in May and lune, the Mounties would take turns going out on patrol. Their trips would take them as far out west
as Norwegian Bay and east to Cape Isabella, just shy of the North Geomagnetic Pole. In luly and August they would make preparations for the annual arrival of the supply ship.

  Despite its various depredations, Craig Harbour was an exciting posting for a man who wanted to test his limits and could stomach the isolation. There was always plenty of bully beef, tobacco and booze. Annual leave was generous and the pay included a hefty hardship allowance. Though hunting musk ox and polar bear was prohibited, headquarters in Ottawa turned a blind eye to it and an active constable at Craig Harbour could make a tidy sum from dealing in pelts. In 1932, Inspector Sandys-Wunsch of the Craig Harbour detachment earned C$5,000 from pelts alone.

  The detachment was ferociously expensive to maintain, though, and it was quietly abandoned in the late 1930s, only to be opened up once again in 1951, at the start of the Cold War, when it became the closest Canadian police detachment to the Soviet Union, across the North Pole.

  With Craig Harbour closed, the Canadian hold on her High Arctic territories once again became tenuous. One of the thorns in the Canadian side remained Amundsen's successful navigation through the Northwest Passage. Amundsen was a Norwegian and his voyage had been followed by enquiries from the Norwegian government as to the sovereign status of those High Arctic islands first navigated and mapped by another Norwegian, Otto Sverdrup. The Canadian administration began to look for other ways to establish authority in the region. In 1940, it asked Henry Larsen to sail the St. Roch and a crew of eight through the Northwest Passage. Canada was keen for a Canadian to complete the navigation before an American got to it. Larsen set out by the southern route but the St. Roch got stuck in ice and was forced to overwinter in the Prince of Wales Strait off Banks Island. She pulled free the following summer, on 31 luly 1941, and began heading north once more, only to find herself trapped by ice again in lames Ross Strait. Northwesterly gales funnelled down McClintock Channel and flung floes against the ship. The ship sailed on but by 11 September she became iced in once more near the magnetic pole. Again, the crew were forced to overwinter and the following August, with the St. Roch still ice-bound, Larsen ordered several gunpowder charges to be set off to break the pack around her bows and reduce pressure on her hull. It was a dangerous strategythe charges could so easily have sunk the ship but it worked. The St Roch escaped her winter prison on the summer winds. But her difficulties were not over. The onward voyage was plagued by dreadful weather. Blizzards started up out of nowhere only to give way to dense banks of fog. Sometimes the fog was so bad the crew had to navigate by watching the wake of the ship and try to keep it in a straight line. At Davis Strait they were confronted with constellations of icebergs and growlers and the sea grew so cold that the men were forced to chip ice off the propeller as they went. On 10 August one of the ship's cylinders blew, the engine room flooded and they narrowly avoided sinking. They put into Pond Inlet on the northeastern coast of Baffin Island to make repairs and on 22 September 1942, more than two years after she had first set out, the St Roch at last arrived at Bateau Harbour, Newfoundland, to a heroes' welcome. Henry Larsen and his crew had become the first Canadians to cross the Northwest Passage, and in 1949, after nearly twenty years at the helm of the St Roch, Henry Larsen was promoted to commander of the RCMP's “G” Division.

  In all his years voyaging around the Arctic, Larsen had developed a particular attachment for the Inuit. He'd seen how tough their lives could be, and with what great stoicism they bore their hardships. He agreed with Robert Flaherty that their contact with white men had done them more harm than good, but it was too late to turn back the clock. From now on white men and Inuit were in the Arctic together. The task was to find a way they could live together amicably and to their mutual benefit.

  Three years after Larsen's promotion to commander of “G” division, in the spring of 1952, the new Northern Affairs Department of the Canadian government organised the first ever Eskimo Affairs Conference in Ottawa. Its mission was to find a solution to the “Eskimo Problem,” which is to say, what white men considered to be the Eskimo Problem, the poor and uncertain living to be made trapping fox pelts. The “Problem” impacted on the Department when the Inuit, demoralised and frustrated by the instability of the fox-fur trade, began to look to the government for welfare payments to keep their children fed. There seemed to be no simple solution. Prior to the conference itself, the Department invited various experts, among them Henry Larsen and James Cantley, to comment on the problem and to propose their own solutions. In his briefing document, Henry Larsen wrote:

  The average Canadian citizen has no conception of how the once healthful and resourceful Eskimo has been exploited to such a degree that he now lives a life comparable to that of a dog… The Eskimos generally have drifted into a state of lack of initiative and confusion. Never has there existed so much destitution, filth and squalor as exists today and in the opinion of some people the conditions under which some natives live are a disgrace to Canada, surpassing the worst evils of slum areas in cities. The sordid conditions existing amongst Eskimos are not known to the general public outside, whose knowledge of the Eskimos generally is that gleaned from glowing accounts which appear in the press occasionally and from romantic photographs in the magazines. The trouble goes back many years, actually, to the time that traders first went into Eskimo territory and changed the whole way of life of the Eskimos … from primarily hunters of meat to primarily trappers of fur … I think it is useless to talk of [the Inuit] resuming the native way of life.

  Larsen went on to argue that the Inuit must be provided with the same access to schools, medical facilities and wage employment as any other Canadians, even if this meant an end to their traditional way of life. His vision was of small Inuit villages scattered around the northern fringes of the continent, not simply where fur traders wanted them to be, but where the Inuit wanted to put them. He wanted the villages equipped with municipal buildings, schools, cooperatives and small, autonomous industries. Welfare dependency, in Larsen's view, was the direct result of fluctuating fur prices.

  To counteract these, he proposed the government set up a Crown Trading Company to ensure the stability of the prices of fox pelts.

  James Cantley took a different view. In Cantley's mind, the problem was as simple as its solution. The Inuit had gone soft. “Goods considered luxuries less than forty years ago are now considered as necessities,” he wrote. Why should the Inuit expect to be able to buy Coleman stoves or working rifles? For thousands of years they had got by on seal-oil lamps and bone harpoons. They should be forced to hunt and trap, reckoned Cantley, but that would be possible only in those settlements where the Hudson Bay Company held a monopoly on fur supply and could control not only the price of pelts but also which trappers got credit and for what. In Cantley's mind, the damage had been done by the RCMP because the Inuit had come to expect that the police would bail them out rather than see them starve. By releasing the Inuit from their historical dependence on the Hudson Bay Company the police had wiped out centuries of effective governance by the Bay in the Arctic. In Cantley's book, it was the police not the Bay who were responsible for wrecking Inuit traditions. The Barrenlanders were used to uncertainty, they were accustomed to starvation. This was their life, their culture, their whole history.

  The solution, Henry Larsen and James Cantley agreed, was to move Inuit away from problem areas. The idea was not new. For many years, whalers moved the families to wherever they could be of most use to them, returning them to their homes at the end of the whaling season. In the 1930s, Inuit were moved experimentally on the Nascopie to Dundas Harbour. The idea of moving people as a solution to the problem of fur prices had first been mooted two years prior to the Eskimo Affairs Conference, in 1950, when Alex Stevenson, an administrator working under James Cantley, asked Henry Larsen whether some Inuit families might be moved from Baffin Island and re-established on Devon and Ellesmere islands. “It would even be possible to go up from Craig in the spring, spend the summer at Bac
he then return in the fall or early winter,” wrote Stevenson in a memo to Larsen. The presence of the Canadian Inuit might deter Greenlanders from crossing over into Ellesmere to hunt musk ox and polar bear and the Inuit would have the chance to hunt and trap on virgin land. Stevenson's boss, James Cantley, encouraged the idea and took it further. “There is no reason why more [Canadian] Eskimos should not be moved over to Ellesmere Island,” he said. In reply, Alex Stevenson wrote, “If police detachments could be maintained at both Craig Harbour and Cape Sabine …ten or twelve families could be transferred to Ellesmere Island and use made of the natural resources that are undoubtedly available there. The occupation of the island by Canadian Eskimos will remove any excuse Greenlanders may presently have for crossing over and hunting there.”

  Henry Larsen and James Cantley repeated their ideas at the conference that spring, to an audience of northern administrators, missionaries, policemen and fur traders. The Inuit were not asked for their opinion.

  And by the time Ross Gibson stepped off the ski-plane at Inuk-juak a decision had already been taken. The Inukjuamiut were to be sent north.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT IS ALREADY halfway through April 1953, and Ross Gibson is sitting in the detachment building figuring out how best to find his volunteers in time for the arrival of the C. D. Howe in July. Out at sea, the ice is breaking into small floes and the Inukjuamiut are widely scattered at camps up and down the coast. To scout out all the camps around the settlement in search of volunteers, he will need to travel 100 miles to the north and 70 miles to the south by dog sled, a round trip of 340 miles. The more he thinks about this the more daunting the whole thing seems. Is the Inukjuak detachment required to find the families or merely advised to do so? What if there are no “volunteers"? Does the Department plan to carry out the relocation anyway? How much pressure can he, Ross Gibson, reasonably be expected to apply to force people to go?